anubhavshakya / musicblocks

Music Blocks -- A musical microworld

MUSIC BLOCKS

“All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians” – Monk

Music Blocks is a programming language and collection of manipulative tools for exploring musical and mathematical concepts in an integrative and fun way.

• Running Music Blocks
• How to set up a local server
• Using Music Blocks
• Modifying Music Blocks
• Credits
• Reporting Bugs
• Contributing
• Music Blocks in Japan

Running Music Blocks

Music Blocks is available under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), a free, copyleft license.

Music Blocks is designed to run in a web browser.

The easiest way to run Music Blocks is to open Music Blocks in your browser (Firefox, Chrome, and Opera work best).

If you want to run Music Blocks offline, download or git clone this repo and run through a local server.

How to set up a local server

Some web browsers (e.g., Firefox v68) have restrictions that prevent Music Blocks from running from the file://. To circumvent this, we provide instructions for launching a web server on your computer to which you can connect to Music Blocks.

(1) In a terminal, cd to the directory where you downloaded Music Blocks (e.g., cd /musicblocks)

(2) If you do not have Python installed, you'll need to install it. (Get it from https://www.python.org) You can test for Python in a terminal: python. Type exit() to exit Python.

(3) After cloning the musicblocks repository, run the command:

$ npm run serve

This works on all Operating Systems with Python.

On Windows sytems with multiple Python installations, it is recommended to use this command instead:

$ npm run winserve

NOTE: Make sure you can run either python or py from your terminal.

(4) You should see a message: Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 3000 ... since the HTTPServer is set to start listening on Port 3000.

(5) Open your favorite browser and run localhost:3000 or 127.0.0.1:3000.

Using Music Blocks

Once Music Blocks is running, you'll want suggestions on how to use it. See Using Music Blocks and Music Blocks Guide.

Looking for a block? Find it in the Palette Tables.

Modifying Music Blocks

The core code for Music Blocks resides in the js directory. Individual modules are described in more detail in js README.md

Note: As with any change, please make your own copy by cloning this respository. Make your changes, test them, and then make a pull request.

See Contributing Code for more details.

Credits

Music Blocks is a fork of TurtleBlocksJS created by Walter Bender.

Devin Ulibarri has contributed functional and user-interface designs. Many of his contributions were inspired by the music education ideas, representations and practices (e.g. aspects of matrix, musical cups) developed and published by Larry Scripp with whom Devin studied at New England Conservatory and for whom he worked at Affron Scripp & Associates, LLC, Center for Music and the Arts in Education (CMAIE), and Music in Education Some of the initial graphics were contributed by Chie Yasuda.

Much of the initial coding specific to Music Blocks was done by Yash Khandelwal as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2015. Hemant Kasat contributed to additional widgets as part of GSoC 2016. Additional contributions are being made by Tayba Wasim, Dinuka Tharangi Jayaweera, Prachi Agrawal, Cristina Del Puerto, and Hrishi Patel as part of GSoC 2017. During GSoC 2018, Riya Lohia developed a Temperament Widget. Ritwik Abhishek added a keyboard widget and a pitch-tracking widget.

Many students contributed to the project as part of Google Code-in (2015–16, 2016–17, and 2017–2018). Sam Parkinson built the Planet during GCI 2016–17. Emily Ong designed our mouse icon and Euan Ong redesigned the Planet code as a series of GCI tasks in 2017–18; Austin George refactored the toolbars as a series of GCI tasks in 2018. In GCI 2019, Bottersnike redesigned the widgets and the Block API, AndreaGon made the widgets responsive, Pidddgy refactored the update code, resulting in an order-of-magnitude improvement in CPU usage, and Nepaltechguy2 updated the local storage mechanism to use localforage.

A full list of contributors is available.

Reporting Bugs

Bugs can be reported in the issues section of this repository.

If possible, please include the browser console log output when reporting bugs. To access the console, type Ctrl-Shift-J on most browsers. You may need to set the "Default level" for the console to "Verbose" in order to see all of the output.

Contributing

Please consider contributing to the project, with your ideas, your music, your lesson plans, your artwork, and your code.

Programmers, please follow these general guidelines for contributions.

Music Blocks in Japan

Gakken STEAM